The Capacity Plan module is fully integrated with the Crystal Ball Settings, ensuring that planning decisions respect the global configuration of the system. This guarantees consistency across supply chain, demand planning, and production capacity management.

General Settings

Planning Based On

This setting determines how the system interprets demand:

• Final Products → The system directly plans based on the final product quantities (no BOM explosion). This is useful for environments where production involves simple assembly or when subassemblies are always available.
• BOM Structure → The system explodes demand into all required subassemblies and components as defined in the Bill of Materials. This is essential for complex, multi-level manufacturing where each operation must be planned individually.

Allocate Capacity Using

This setting defines how resources are allocated:

• Workstation → Capacity is planned against specific machines or workstations. Suitable for machine-intensive production environments.
• Teams → Capacity is planned against production teams, where human resources are the main constraint.
• Both → Both workstation and team availability are considered, ensuring realistic alignment in environments where both machines and people are equally critical.

Scheduling Behavior

Auto Shift Overflow to Next Day

If an operation cannot be completed within a shift, the remaining time is automatically pushed to the next available day/shift.

Operation Start Gap (Minutes)

Ensures a buffer between consecutive operations on the same workstation. This accounts for setup time, cleaning, or operator rest.

Scheduling Strategy:

• Earliest Fit → Schedule as soon as capacity is available.
• Load Balancing → Distribute workload evenly across resources.
• Round Robin → Assign sequentially to available workstations/teams for fair distribution.

Workstation Assignment Basis

Determines how the system selects which workstation to use when multiple are available. Criteria can include: * Location (factory site). * Machine Type (CNC, Lathe, Assembly Station, etc.). * Resource Grouping (work cells or departments).